If I thought
any of
you had any opinion about the
guilt of my clients, I wouldn't worry, because that might be
changed.
What I'm worried about is prejudice. They are harder to
change.
They come with your mother's milk and stick like the color of the skin.
I know that if these defendants had been a white group defending
themselves
from a colored mob, they never would have been arrested or tried.
My clients are charged with murder, but they are really charged with
being
black. --Clarence Darrow, 11/24/25.

The automobile and manufacturing
boom
that began in Detroit about 1915
made the city a magnet for blacks fleeing the economic stagnation of
the
South. In the decade from 1915 to 1925, Detroit's black
population
grew more than tenfold, from 7,000 to 82,000. A severe housing
shortage
developed, as the city's compact black district could not accommodate
all
the new arrivals. [LINK
TO "THE RACES IN DETROIT"]

Blacks brave enough to purchase or
rent
homes in previously all-white
neighborhoods faced intimidation and violence. The spring and
summer
of 1925 saw several ugly housing-related incidents. In April,
5000
people crowded in front of a home on Northfield Avenue, throwing rocks
and threatening to burn the house down. "The house is being
rented
by blacks," someone in the crowd explained to police arriving at the
scene.
Two months later, Dr. Alexander Turner, a black physician, purchased an
expensive brick home on Spokane Avenue. Minutes after the
Turner's
moving van arrived at his new home, an angry crowd gathered.
Windows
shattered as brick, potatoes and other missiles were hurled at the
home.
Within hours, two white men--from an organization called the Tireman
Avenue
Improvement Association--entered Turner's home and asked, "Will you
sell
the property back to us?" Fearing for his life, Turner agreed to
sell. The next month, John Fletcher and his family were the
targets
of mob violence. The Fletchers had just sat down to a meal in
their
new home on Stoepel Avenue when they were spotted through a window by a
passing white woman. The woman began to yell, "Niggers live
there!
Niggers live there!" Soon a crowd of 4000 had gathered.
Some
in the crowd yelled, "Lynch them!" Chunks of coke smashed through
windows. Two shots rang out from the Fletcher's home. One
struck
a teenager in the thigh. Police arrested the Fletchers--they
would
move out the next day.

It was in this violent summer of
1925
that a black doctor named Ossian
Sweet purchased a home
at 2905 Garland, in an all-white middle-class neighborhood.
Although
Sweet originally planned to move his family into the new home in July,
he postponed the move for two months in the hopes that racial tensions
might ease. They didn't.

On July 12, 1925, the Detroit Free
Press
carried a paid announcement:

To maintain the high
standard of
the residential district between
Jefferson and Mack Avenues, a meeting has been called by the Waterworks
Improvement Association for Thursday night in the Howe School
Auditorium.
Men and women of the district, which includes Cadillac, Hurburt,
Garland,
St. Clair, and Harding Avenues, are asked to attend in self-defense.

Two days later, seven hundred
white
residents of the district crammed into
the Howe School Auditorium to discuss the rumored move of a black
family
into 2905 Garland. The principal speaker for the meeting was a
representative
from the Tireman Association, the group that had successfully driven
Dr.
Turner from his new home the month before. The loudest cheer of the
evening
came in response to the speaker's contention, " Where the nigger shows
his head, the white must shoot."

Despite being aware of the danger,
Dr.
Sweet decided to move his family
into his Garland Avenue home on September 8. Ossian Sweet explained his
decision to his brother: "I have to die like a man or live a
coward."
Before moving in, Sweet prepared himself for the mob he expected to
face.
He bought nine guns and enough ammunition for all of them. He
notified
Detroit police of his planned move and asked for protection. He
left
his infant daughter at his wife's mother's home. Finally, he
arranged
to have his younger brothers, Henry
and Otis,
as well as some of their
friends,
join him and his wife Gladys for their first perilous night on Garland
Avenue.

The night of September 8 passed
without
serious incident. A crowd
of 100 to 150 people remained in front of the Sweet house for much of
the
night, but except for one barrage of rocks thrown against the house
around
3:00 A.M., no violence occurred. As one of the occupants of the
Sweet
house departed the next morning, one member of the mob still in front
of
the home told him, "The crowd had a meeting last night at the
confectionery
store....They say you better get out of here tonight."
Hearing the report of possible violence, Ossian Sweet recruited three
young friends join them for the night of September 9.

The next evening was hot. Gladys
Sweet worked in the kitchen preparing a meal of roast pork, sweet
potatoes
and mustard greens. Ossian Sweet and his acquaintances played
cards.
Someone in the house exclaimed, "My God, look at the people!" The
Sweets looked out through their windows and a screen door to see a
swelling
crowd--filling the nearby steelyard, the space around a grocery store,
the alley, the porches of nearby homes. According to the Sweets,
stones began flying. They were gripped with fear. Around 8
o'clock a taxi cab pulled up in front of the Sweet home. Ossian's
brother Otis and a friend emerged from the cab to hear cries of
"Niggers!
Niggers! Get the damn niggers!" As he opened the door to let them
in, Ossian Sweet said later, "the whole situation filled me with an
appalling
fear--a fear that no one could comprehend but a Negro, and that Negro
one
who knew the history behind his people."

The Sweets pulled down the blinds
and
waited. Rocks hit the house.
One smashed through an upstairs window. At 8:25, a fusillade of
shots
rang out from the upper floor and back porch of the Sweet home.
One
of the bullets struck thirty-three-year-old Leon Breiner in the back as
he stood on the porch of 2914 Garland, talking to friends.
Breiner's
last words were, "Boys, they've shot me." Police covered Breiner
with a blanket and took him away. Nearby, another man, Eric
Houghberg,
lay with a bullet wound to the leg.

Six policeman (who had been present
at
the house at the time of the
shooting) entered the Sweet home, flung up all the shades, turned on
all
the lights, and arrested the eleven occupants. At police
headquarters,
the Sweets and their house guests were told for the first time that a
man
had been killed and a boy wounded. Each of the arrested persons
was
interviewed separately. They gave wildly different accounts of
events.
Some claimed to have been sleeping at the time of the shooting; one
claimed
to have been taking a bath. Ossian Sweet admitted having distributed a
gun to each male occupant, while some of those interviewed denied any
knowledge
of guns. At about 3:30 A.M., an assistant prosecutor informed them that
he planned to recommend first degree murder warrants against all
eleven.

On September 16, at a preliminary
hearing, Judge John Faust denied bail
for all defendants. Following the hearing, thirty-five-year-old Judge
Frank Murphy, the presiding judge of Recorder's Court, assigned
himself
to the trial of the Sweet case. Murphy explained that he took the case
because "every judge on this bench is afraid....they think its
dynamite."
He also admitted to a more self-serving reason for wanting the trial:
"[The
other judges] don't realize this is the opportunity of a lifetime to
demonstrate
sincere liberalism and judicial integrity at a time when liberalism is
coming into its own." Murphy set October 30 as the date for the
start
of the trial.

Meanwhile, efforts were underway to
put
together a first-rate defense
team. After learning of the mass arrest in Detroit, the NAACP had sent
Walter White, its assistant secretary, to Michigan on a fact-finding
mission.
After completing his assignment, White returned to New York where he
met
with Arthur Garfield Hays, a noted civil rights attorney, and Clarence
Darrow, the most famous defense attorney of the time, and urged
them
to take the Sweet case. It didn't take much urging.

Darrow and Hays arrived in Detroit
on
October 12. They went to
the Detroit jail, were ushered up two flights of stairs, and in a
small,
poorly lit room with a table and broken chairs, met their clients for
the
first time. Hays described the clients reaction to their visit as
being "cheered, but not hopeful."

Darrow and Hays--according to Hays'
account--"concluded that the only
defense lay in making a clean breast of the whole matter," but found
their
clients "evasive" and unwilling to talk. According to Hays, they
"had a very human desire to support their original and inept
stories."
The only one of the bunch who seemed to want to talk about the incident
"was rather proud of the fracas--the whites had learned a
lesson."
Gradually, however, Hays and Darrow were able to piece together a
plausible
story of the events of September 9.

After a week of jury selection,
assistant
prosecutor Lester
S. Moll delivered his opening statement to the all-white
jury.
He described a peaceful neighborhood whose tranquility was shattered by
an unprovoked barrage of gunfire. Moll conceded that blacks had a civil
right to live wherever they chose, but suggested to the jury that the
most
important civil right of all is the right to live--a right Leon Breiner
forfeited on September 9 as he amiably smoked his pipe on a neighbor's
porch. This is not a case about racial prejudice, Moll told the
jury--it
is a case about premeditated murder. As Moll delivered his
opening
statement, Clarence Darrow ostentatiously worked on a crossword puzzle.

The State would call seventy
witnesses in
the Sweet trial. Most
would testify that the crowd outside the Sweet home was small and
orderly
prior to the shooting. Many said it was "curiosity" that had
brought
them to the corner of Garland and Charlevoix. Some, such as
neighbor
Ray Dove, admitted on cross-examination that they didn't "believe
in
the mixing of blacks and whites" and objected to the Sweets living in
their
new home. One witness (Edward Weltlauffer) admitted to hearing
"cracking
of glass" one minute before the firing. A police sergeant
testified
that he "talked to Dr. Sweet the morning before the shooting" and
informed
him that five men had been sent to his house to "protect the
property."
Patrolmen Frank Gill testified that he saw two black men firing from
the
back porch of the Sweet home in different directions. Florence
Ware
said she saw "ten or so" shots come from the upper bedroom.

Arthur Garfield Hays gave the opening
statement for the defense. He asked each member of the
Sweet family to stand as he gave a short biographical sketch of
each.
"They don't look like murderers," he suggested to the jury. Hays
introduced
the defense's theory of the case:

We shall show not only
what
happened in the house, but we shall
attempt a far more difficult task-that of reproducing in the cool
atmosphere
of a courtroom, a state of mind-the state of mind of these defendants,
worried, distrustful, tortured and apparently trapped-a state of mind
induced
by what has happened to others of their race, not only in the South
where
their ancestors were once slaves, but even in the North in the States
which
once fought for their freedom.

Beginning with their first
witness,
Alonzo Smith, a black passenger in
a car that had been attacked by the mob as it passed through the
Garland
Avenue district, Darrow and Hays tried to paint a very different
picture
of the scene around the Sweet home on September 9. Smith
described
people in the crowd he estimated at one thousand yelling, "Here's a
nigger
now. Kill him. He's going to the Sweets." Other defense
witnesses
testified that they saw persons in a large crowd throwing stones at the
Sweet home.

Darrow and Hays saw the testimony
of
Ossian Sweet as the most critical
to their case. It would be through his testimony that they would
attempt to show the jury the fear that existed in the minds of the
defendants
on the night of the shooting. Asked to state his "state of mind
at
the time of the shooting," Sweet replied, "When I opened the door and
saw
the mob I realized I was facing the same mob that hounded my people
throughout
its entire history." Prosecutor
Robert
Toms
asked Judge Murphy to exclude the defense's state-of-mind evidence as
it
related to race: "Is everything this man saw as a child justification
for
a crime twenty-five years later?" Darrow responded:

This is the question of
the
psychology of a race--of how everything
known to a race affects its actions. What we learn as children we
remember--it stays fastened in the mind....Because the defendant's
actions
were predicated on the psychology of his past, I ask that this
testimony
be admitted.

Judge Murphy ruled that the
state-of-mind testimony could be considered
by the jury.

Sweet provided a riveting account
of the
events around 8:30 on September
9:

We were playing cards; it
was
about eight o'clock when something
hit the roof of the house. Somebody went to the window and then I heard
the remark, "The people, the people." I ran out to the kitchen where my
wife was. There were several lights burning. I turned them
out and opened the door. I heard someone yell, "Go and raise hell in
front,
I'm going back. I was frightened, and after getting a gun, ran
upstairs.
Stones kept hitting our house intermittently. I threw myself on
the
bed and lay there a short while. Perhaps fifteen minutes, when a
stone came through the window. Part of the glass hit me.
Pandemonium--I
guess that's the best way of describing it--broke loose. Everyone
was running from room to room. There was a general uproar.
Somebody yelled, "There's someone coming!" They said, "That's
your
brother." A car had pulled up to the curb. My brother and
Mr.
Davis got out. The mob yelled, "Here's niggers! Get them, get
them!"
As they rushed in, the mob surged forward fifteen or twenty feet.
It looked like a human sea. Stones kept coming faster. I
ran
downstairs. Another window was smashed. Then one
shot.
Then eight or ten from upstairs; then it was all over....

Robert Toms asked why his
courtroom
testimony differed from that given
to police on the night of his arrest. "I am under oath now,"
Sweet
answered. "I was very excited then and afraid that what I said
might
be misinterpreted."

Lester Moll offered the first
closing
argument for the State.
He described the defense's "fear complex theory" as "poppycock."
He accused Darrow of trying to present a "dissertation on race
relations
since the remotest time."

You are facing a problem
of two
races, a problem that will
take centuries to solve. If I felt none of you were prejudiced,
I'd
have no fear. I want you to be as unprejudiced as you can
be.....Draw
upon your imagination and think how you would feel if you fired
at
some black man in a black community, and then had to be tried by them.

Darrow told the jury the
danger
the Sweets faced that night was real:

The danger of a mob is not
what
it does, but what it might
do. Mob psychology is the most dreadful thing with which man has
to contend. Its action is like the starting of a prairie
fire.
A match in the stuble, and it spreads and spreads, devouring everything
in its way....the mob was waiting to see the sacrifice of some helpless
blacks. They came with malice in their hearts...

The final closing
argument
belonged to Prosecutor Toms. Toms told the jury "It isn't your
business
to settle [the race problem]." He asked them to remember that
this
"this courtroom is just a tiny speck in the world" and that there "are
other worlds to consider." Darrow, he said, "doesn't want to look
at it as a criminal case, but as a cross-section of human nature.
But that's what were here for." He disputed Darrow's claim that
the
people gathered outside the Sweet home had malice in their hearts:
"There
is no scintilla of evidence to show that the Association banded
together
to drive Negroes out of the neighborhood."

In his instructions to the jury,
Judge
Murphy told the twelve men that
"all men are equal under the law, whether they be rich or poor, black
or
white, humble or great. It is the duty of each of you to reach for
justice."
At 3:30 on November 25, 1925, the case went to the jury.

As the jury deliberated the rest of
that
day and all of the next (Thanksgiving),
"Darrow lolled on a sofa in the judge's office and confessed to being
very
tired." He told a reporter for the Detroit Free Press that he
expected
the jury to have difficulty in reaching its decision. From the
judge's
chambers, voices of the jury--often raised in heated debate--could be
heard.
Debate quieted when a "splendid turkey with fixings" was delivered to
the
juryroom.

The next day the jury, after
deliberating
for forty-six hours, told
Judge Murphy that they thought it would be impossible to reach a
verdict
in the case. Murphy dismissed the jury and declared a
mistrial.
According to reports, seven of the jurors had favored conviction (for
manslaughter)
for Ossian and Henry Sweet, five favored acquittal. For the other
defendants, the vote was ten to two in favor of acquittal.

Darrow hoped that the hung jury
would
convince Robert Toms to drop charges.
He was soon disappointed. Toms announced plans to proceed with a
second trial. After Darrow moved to have the defendants tried
separately,
Toms decided to proceed first with a retrial of Henry Sweet, Ossian
Sweet's
younger brother, who had admitted firing shots out the front window in
the direction of Leon Breiner.

Released on bail, the Sweets chose
not to
return to their Garland Avenue
home. The home was set on fire that winter of 1925-26, but the
blaze
was extinguished quickly and the house escaped serious damage.

Darrow returned to Detroit in
April,
1926, to prepare for the Henry
Sweet trial. Darrow told reporters that he liked
Detroit--especially
because of its proximity to Windsor, Ontario, where the Prohibition
Amendment
had no force. Moreover, he looked forward to another trial before Judge
Murphy, who he called "the kindliest and most understanding man I have
ever happened to meet on the bench."
Darrow--uncharacteristically--even
had good things to say about the prosecutors. He described Toms
as
"one of the fairest and most humane prosecutors I have ever met."

The second trial proceeded much as
the
first--though "more smoothly,"
according to Darrow. [ An eyewitness account of the second trial
by Marcet Haldeman-Julius is provided elsewhere on this website.
See: TRIAL
ACCOUNT.] The most important difference between the
two
trials lay in Darrow's final plea. Darrow called his eight-hour
summation
in the Henry Sweet trial "one of the strongest and most satisfactory
arguments
that I have ever delivered." Marcet-Haldeman Julius offered this
impression of Darrow's closing:

Twice he almost concluded,
and
then, as if some deep instinct
warned him that he had not yet said quite all—that perhaps he had left
uncovered in the minds of those men before him some tiny point upon
which
might hinge that kind, splendid young colored chap’s whole future—he
would
go on. Few of us will ever forget the picture of him as he stood,
worn after the long day of intense, if for the most part quiet,
pleading.
With arm uplifted, on a level with his breast, hand out-spread in that
typical gesture of his when he wants his listeners to concentrate, his
eyes searching the very hearts of the member before him, he spoke once
more of the long road ahead of the Negro, of the sorrows, the
tribulations,
that confronted him, urged the jury not to put anything further in his
way; impressed upon them the desperate need both white and colored folk
had for sanity and courage. “I ask you, gentlemen,” he said, “in
behalf of the progress and understanding of the human race that you
return
a verdict of ‘Not Guilty.’” To many of us he seemed like one of
the
prophets of old come to speak a word of warning and of
guidance.
[Darrow's complete summation, edited by Professor Bruce W. Frier
of the Michigan Law School, is posted elsewhere on this website.
See:DARROW'S
SUMMATION.]

As Judge Murphy left the bench,
he took
a friend's hand and said, "This
is the greatest experience of my life. That was Clarence Darrow
at
his best. I will never hear anything like it again. He is
the
most Christlike man I have ever known."

Robert Tom's summed up for the
prosecution the next morning, and the
jury was sent off to begin its deliberations. It did not take
long.
Four hours after they began discussions, the jury door was unlocked and
twelve men, in single file, marched into the courtroom. "Have you
gentlemen in the course of your deliberations reached a verdict in the
case of Henry Sweet? And if so, who will answer for you?"
The
jury foreman, George Small, the young Detroit manager of Cunard
Anchor
Lines, responded, "We have and I will." Small cleared his throat.
"Not guilty," he said, as his voice broke. Tears rolled down the
cheeks of Clarence Darrow and Henry Sweet.